Review

Linda Symcox's book, an outgrowth of her dissertation under Charlotte Crabtree at UCLA, depicts the ebb and flow of educational reform movements in the United States during the twentieth century, and focuses on the role of history and social studies curriculums in the K-12 classroom. Symcox was the assistant director for the National History Standards Project from 1990 to 1996, and does not hide her ideological perspective from the reader. She presents the origins of the neo-conservative movement of the 1980s and 1990s, while also examining the source of the new social history. Symcox's main thesis is that the competing ideas about schooling in the twentieth century moved inevitably towards a paradigm shift that backfired in the 1990s. While the traditionalists initially pushed for the National History Standards, they were frustrated in the end by the people who wrote those standards.	1
Symcox's analysis begins with the reform cycles begun during the Progressive era at the turn of the century. The progressives asked the question, "Is the purpose of schooling to maximize individual potential or should schools be instruments of social reform?" From the child-study advocates to the social efficiency proponents, to the social meliorists, each movement had a different answer to that question. As in the progressive movement itself, these attempts at curricular reform resulted in piecemeal curriculum change. Symcox goes on to explain the paradigm shift within the history profession from 1960 to 1990. This shift from the traditional canon to the new social history would become the heart of the culture wars. Whose history was it anyway? This "cult of theory" versus the traditional canon is examined in some depth in chapters three and four, which depict the origins of the neo-conservative movement under Presidents Reagan and Bush, and the beginnings of the National Center for History. Ironically, as she was later to become its most visible critic, Lynne Cheney was the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and initially funded and praised the efforts of the center in establishing national standards for United States and world history.	2
Chapter five exhumes the building and unraveling of the national history standards. Symcox engages the reader in the bitter battles fought between the advocates of the content of the standards and the advocates of the process of the standards, though occasionally she could define the terms of the various methodological schools a bit more carefully (she condemns critical thinking skills as "social studies skills," p. 102). Symcox identifies the heart of the problem as follows: "Traditionally history had been conceived as a finished product to be consumed by K-12 students, rather than as an intellectual process in which students could engage actively and critically" (115). The traditionalists hoped to preserve the canon, while the historians and educators who worked on the standards were operating from a new paradigm, which the traditionalists feared would "challenge the grand narrative with competing narratives of their own." (p. 117). As the differences between these groups became more pronounced the consensus that built the standards unraveled.	3
In chapter six, Symcox presents the "lost voices" of the K-12 teachers who worked on the standards, and their objections to the critics, who largely based their allegations on Cheney's analysis of a very small number of teaching examples from the standards, and who did not read the standards themselves. The fear that social history would contribute to cultural relativism, calling "into question hallowed, shared beliefs about policy, institutions and leaders" (p. 159) struck a chord with many in the American public, who did not share the historians' view on the latest advances in social and cultural history. In the end, Symcox is unable to show how these differences can be resolved; she simply notes that paradigm shifts favor researchers over practitioners. "People will always differ on what they perceive to be the purpose of education and the best way to achieve its goals" (pp. 164–5).	4
Symcox's study is illuminating and full in its coverage, but it leaves this reader waiting for a more finely nuanced account of the origins and results of this cycle in history educational reform. Her account is stated in terms of opposites rather than in terms of compromise. Many of the shock waves of the standards movement are still working their way through the levels of the educational system today. The paradigm shift may not yet be over. For anyone involved in implementing state or national standards in their school, this book is a must read as it certainly helps to define some of the problems we face as educators in the history profession today.	5
Iolani School, Honolulu Deborah C. Hall

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